just purchased my first mac, the imac. it's been a real nightmare as far as data transfer goes. have 550 gb photo files on my pc which apple has been transferring to the mac since last friday night. all kinds of problems have occurred and the final outcome is that they were unable to transfer about 200gbs of files. could be that one or more files were corrupted.

i have ordered LR4 and plan on downloading it next week. once it's been downloaded i will be paying someone (by the hour) to help me import files into LR and also to help organize my catalogs.

any idea how long it would take to import anywhere from 300 to 550gbs of files into LR? if it's going to be a very long time then maybe i will download them myself. would feel more secure if this person were there tho.

Harvey, I know you have been around in these forums for a while, so I am going to assume that on your previous computer, your photos were ALREADY imported into Lightroom. In that case, you DO NOT import the photos again on the new computer.

So, how long does it take? If you do it the way I described, a few minutes at most.

Regarding "help organize my catalogs", the best organization that I know of is to put them all into a single catalog (and then the issue of "organizing catalogs" goes away). There are situations where you might reasonably want multiple catalogs, for example, when your subject matter is completely non-overlapping, like business and personal, but otherwise one catalog is the way to go. This should be a separate activity, begun after the transfer to the new computer has everything working properly.

yes, my photos are already in LR on my pc. am happy to know that this is all there is to it. i should have googled it first because when i did i found several sites dealing with exactly this subject.

the question that i had asked about a week ago as to whether i should store my photo files in the hard drive or on an external hard drive has been answered for me. due to one or more corrupted files, the apple store people were only able to transfer about 300 of the 555gb photo files that were on my pc. that means that i will have to use the external drive to access the photos. that is ok with me.

i could link LR on the mac with the photo files on the hard drive. that would show me the missing folders and i could drag and drop them from the ext drive onto the hard drive but i think that would be too tedious and time consuming,

thanks again dj. i'm sure that i will have more LR ?s the more i use this mac.